Pouya Ehsaei
live electronic musician, composer, sound designer, producer, radio host
People of the Wind is an album which I composed and produced during my 6-month residency at the Horniman Museum in 2024. The album is recorded in collaboration with multi-wind instrumentalist Tamar Osborn and poet and performer Tara Fatehi and percussionist Afla Sackey. I am looking for an affordable studio to start the mixing process. The album is based in research around Zar, a ritual brought into Iran, via the movement of African people through the “Indian Ocean Slave Trade,” the project centres stories of immigration, cultural transmutations, and the necessity of music and art to those who have been displaced.
A recording of one of From the Lips to the Moon live improvised performances at Refrence Point in London. Each FTLTTM performance is a unique experience with a fresh line-up of guest musicians and poets weaving together live electronics, unearthly melodies, noise, twisted beats, fierce poetry, heavy subs, and non-stories told in half-familiar languages.
There is an album I made with the classical and regional music of Iran as source material and using MAX/MSP as algorithmic compositional tool.
Press
“... forbidding and more agile, based around exceptionally spare bass sine waves, skeins of interference, crashing stepped tones and the ghosts of rhythms.” [The Wire]
‘‘Pouya Ehsaei’s exquisite sound design plays a big part in reflecting the passing of time, switching from Iranian pop music to radio broadcasts and air raid sirens’’ [The Guardian]
"Formidably integrated. A sonic terra incognita guided only by a hypnotic and dubwise focus on forward motion" [The Wire]
“A soundscape that was paralyzing & moving all at once” [Pitchfork]
“A bold, standout statement with some high-f drum work” [Bleep]
“And over it all, like… a cloud of unknowing, an electronic shroud blocks out the light, whitewashes the history, substitutes itself for the truth; and nothing stands in its way.” [A Closer Listen]